Social media trends are constantly evolving, but there is one social media giant that has the resources to add new features much more quickly compared to the rest: Facebook. Facebook is no longer just a place to connect with friends and family anymore. It's where you can learn about new events, follow your favorite brands, show your support for causes, and even shop.

Like most businesses, Facebook doesn’t want you to leave its site. That’s why the social media giant does everything in its power to use the latest social media trends to prevent users from leaving Facebook and going to external sites to get what they need.

Here are some changes that support Facebook’s goal of being your one-stop-shop for literally everything.

FACEBOOK SHOPPING AND SERVICES SECTION

Some Facebook pages have a new test shopping feature, which will be a huge game-changer for many brands. This new shopping section means companies can offer and sell physical products (no services yet) directly on Facebook. All orders are placed and managed on Facebook and paid for using an integrated payment processing system called Stripe. It’s important to note that like many credit card processing softwares, Stripe charges a service fee based on a percentage of sales. Facebook, however, is not charging any fees.

Facebook users can also find your shop by browsing the new ‘Shops’ section, accessible on the side of News Feeds (on mobile and desktop). Through this, customers can find products for sale by category and buy them in just one click.

We have even noticed some brands boosting products, which show up as available for purchase directly underneath the ad. Once a brand marks the order as shipped, Stripe will transfer the money to their account. Although this new shopping feature isn’t available to all pages yet, we think it will be in the very near future once Facebook works out all the kinks.

FACEBOOK MESSENGER ADS

One of Facebook’s newest advertising feature allows brands to send direct, private messages to customers who engage with their ad. If you are a brand that utilizes Messenger Bots, this is a perfect way for easy one-click ordering and/or purchasing. We can imagine quick-service brands like Domino’s Pizza or even Postmates utilizing this service.

However, unless you have a bot set up, we don’t recommend this type of ad type for most brands because it creates an extra step for the customer to get to your website. Perhaps brands looking for sales leads might be able to use this ad format instead of Facebook’s more expensive Lead Ads. But Messenger Bots might be the way of the future for brands, so we don’t see this feature going away anytime soon.

A couple of months ago, Facebook told investors that its next play would be further developing a long-term search strategy. This likely means Facebook’s search function is about to get a huge overhaul to be more like Google’s search function when consumers are looking for businesses and brands.

According to The Drum, “Facebook’s advantage in monetising search lies in the research and recommendation stage, where reviews, recommendations and visit data can be leveraged to deliver more personalised results to the user, with the potential of intercepting the intent-based search before they go to Google.”

Essentially, all those Facebook reviews and user check-ins will mean something even more for brands.

WHAT NOW?

As you can see, it will now be more important than ever to keep up with social media trends and ensure brands have great reviews and optimized pages in order to capitalize on these upcoming platform changes.